Tag Archives: apache

Someone out there on the internet is repeatedly hitting this blog’s /xmlrpc.php service, probably looking to enumerate the user accounts on the blog as a precursor to a password scan (as described in Huge increase in WordPress xmlrpc.php POST requests at Sysadmins of the North). My access logs look like this:

By itself, this is just annoying — but the real problem is that the PHP stack is getting invoked each time to deal with the request, and at several requests per second from different hosts this was putting quite a load on the server. I decided to fix the problem with a slight variation from what is suggested in the Sysadmins of the North blog post. This addition to the .htaccess file at the root level of my WordPress instance rejects the connection attempt at the Apache level rather than the PHP level:

This is a preview of Blocking /xmlrpc.php Scans in the Apache .htaccess File. Read the full post (213 words, 51 seconds estimated reading time)

In this How-To guide, I show a combination of software and configuration to clean up URLs by removing the port numbers of the Java servlet engine (Tomcat) and the context path of the application. The goal is to create “cool URLs” that are are short (removing the unnecessary context path) and follow conventions (using the default port “80” rather than “8080”). OhioLINK also uses a custom access control module — built for Apache HTTPD — which makes the fronting of Apache HTTPD for Tomcat even more desirable.

This is a preview of Fronting Tomcat with Apache HTTPD to Remove Ports and Context Paths. Read the full post (562 words, 2:15 minutes estimated reading time)

A couple of notes on the mechanisms Rob is using. Apache Solr is an open source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library (also an Apache project). You can think of Lucene as the raw indexing and search engine with Solr layered on top to provide a non-Java interface to a rich feature set. What Miami has done is extract all of the bibliographic and related item records out of their Innovative Interface system, written programs to transform that data into XML, indexed it with Solr/Lucene and created a search interface.

This is a preview of Solr-ized MARC Record Catalog. Read the full post (471 words, 2 images, 1:53 minutes estimated reading time)

Well, something is still going wrong on dltj.org — despite previous performance tuning efforts, I’m still running into cases where machine performance grinds to a halt. In debugging it a bit further, I’ve found that the root cause is an apache httpd process which wants to consume nearly all of real memory which then causes the rest of the machine to thrash horribly. The problem is that I haven’t figured out what is causing that one thread to want to consume so much RAM — nothing unusual appears in either the access or the error logs and I haven’t figured out a way to debug a running apache thread. (Suggestions anyone?)

This is a preview of Killing Off Runaway Apache Processes. Read the full post (411 words, 1:39 minutes estimated reading time)

From the Disruptive Library Technology Jester (http://dltj.org/), printed on Tuesday the 3rd of March 2015 at 7:28:13 PM UTC (+0000). The URL to this page is

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